Bette Davis (11 page)

Although Bette had left Werner's office fearful that she had made a terrible mistake, her trepidation about going to Hollywood was

even greater after she went to see Lynn Fontanne in Maxwell Anderson's new play, Elizabeth the Queen, at the Guild Theatre. Fontanne 's performance instantly and forcefully reminded Bette of the kind of bravura acting she had dreamed of doing in New York.

Not long afterward, determined to go to Hollywood after all, Bette was with her mother at the train station, where Robin and her new husband had come to see them off. Ruthie was all anticipation about the glorious new life that awaited them in Los Angeles, certain that her years of putting everything into her daughter were about to pay off. That Bette was less certain about exactly what faced her when she reported for work at Universal is suggested by her shocked and indignant reaction to Arthur Byron's good-natured teasing about all the "cheesecake" she would be expected to do in Hollywood. Even as Bette vigorously protested that she was a serious actress and would never consider doing such a thing, she could scarcely conceal her anxiety that he might be right.

Bette's capacity for expressive movement as no one in Hollywood had done before him, his selection of the fitting room sequence as the first they shot together may have been his way of telling her that if she was to become the kind of actress she wanted to be, she needed to exert some restraint—or have it done for her. To Wyler's way of thinking, for all its exuberance, her gestural style was fiissy, mannered, with movements that all too often blurred into one another because she hadn't learned to pace herself, to let a performance build and gather momentum. So desperate was she to exercise her powers at every instant that she tended to wear out her effects—or so it seemed to Wyler, who used the metal dress form to slow her down: to say,"Take it easy!" (as he seemed never to tire of telling her through all three pictures they would work on together).

Born in 1902 of Swiss-German parents in Mulhouse, Alsace, Wyler had come to the United States in 1921 to work in the New York office of Universal Pictures, whose founder, Carl Laemmle, was his mother's cousin. Within a year Wyler was in Hollywood, where, grinding out two-reel silent westerns in the Mustang series and five-reelers in the Blue Streak series, he learned what he called "the fundamentals of making films, which lie in movement." He often found himself, awake at night, trying to invent, among other things, new and visually more interesting ways for his cowboys to get on their horses.

After more than a decade of directing silent and then sound films, Wyler in 1936 worked for the first time with the cameraman Gregg Toland on Lillian Hellman's These Three (an adaptation of her play The Children's Hour). Fresh possibilities for the treatment of physical movement emerged, as Toland helped him to stage scenes without a great deal of cutting, in order for spectators to view the action as a whole almost as they would at a stage play or, for that matter, a dance performance.

This was another reason why in 1937, as he and Bette prepared to shoot the fitting room sequence in Jezebel, Wyler discouraged her from flinging herself at every moment. Wyler's predilection Shallowing the action to unfold continuously (with cuts mainly for emphasis) made him want Bette to show die gradual unfolding of a series of gestures and all the gradations of feeling it encompassed.

As chronicled in the studio production reports (with further details gleaned from Davis's and Wyler's annotated scripts), on October 25, after two hours of work on her makeup and hair, Bette spent an hour rehearsing the four-page sequence, in which she never once moves off the raised platform around which the contrasting

action in the fitting room swirls. For much of the sequence (although it all happens so briskly that we may not be quite conscious of it), Bette's immobility from the waist down is made to feel all the more curious by the dress form's being entirely concealed, along with the stool she perches on, by the ornate white ball gown in which Julie is being fitted.

"I don't like the collar," she says ("fretfully," according to the script). "And does it have to be so tight here? It binds. And the skirt-"

Called upon by the screenplay to "twist" about as she speaks, here Bette makes Julie Marsden a great fidget, her arms full of kinetic tension as she tugs at her fingers: the abrupt, petulant hand gestures (Delsarte called the hands • 'the direct agents of the mind'') suggesting that it isn't so much the gown that agitates Julie just now as her fiance's refusal in the previous sequence to leave an important business meeting at the Diliard Bank to accompany her to Mme. Poulard's.

In the midst of all this restless fluttering of arms, hands, and fingers, Julie's train of thought is suddenly interrupted when she notices one of Mme. Poulard's midinettes flitting past, with a red satin dress on a hanger. The screenplay has Julie "eye the dress with interest''; to which Bette and Wyler have added a subtle three-step gesture sequence that allows us to gauge her growing fascination with the "bold and saucy" red dress and how she may use it to get back at her fiance for displeasing her.

First Julie's arms pause in midair—bent at the elbows, fingers curled against palms—forming a sharp contrast to what until now has been their ceaseless, nervous movement. Then, as Aunt Belle chatters on, oblivious to what her niece is thinking, we see Julie's left hand open just a bit, fingers uncurling like the petals of a flower: a limpid, delicate movement that we would scarcely have noticed if Bette had failed to pause first ("Take it easy!") and hold the previous gesture for an all-important instant or two.

Having made her decision (in the time it took for her hand to open), Julie signals the midinette with a Graham-like thrust of the left arm ("Reach out! Take in space!"), whose abruptness is felt all the more powerfully by contrast with the fineness of the gesture that preceded it; and in relation to the nearly imperceptible camera movement as Wyler pulls back a little, adjusting the scale to accommodate her arm thrust. Only after she beckons with the fingers of her outstretched hand ("Complete every gesture down to the fingertips!") does the camera return to its original position, as if in answer to her summons.

"Saucy—isn't it?" Julie says of the red dress to Aunt Belle, who replies, "—and vulgar!"; at precisely which moment Wyler cuts to a fresh camera angle, by way of emphasizing that the fitting room sequence has passed from its initial setup to the conflict that follows, as Julie and Aunt Belle argue about the propriety of wearing red to the Olympus Ball ("You know you can't!" "Can't I?"): an issue that will become the springboard of the narrative action when Julie's decision causes Pres Dillard to break their engagement.

While Aunt Belle frantically darts in and out of frame, with her back to the camera, this second shot brings us in much closer to Julie, who, assisted by Mme. Poulard's girl, struggles to unfasten the tightly cinched ball gown with an urgency that suggests she thinks undoing all the garment's intricate constraints will liberate her spirit as well as her flesh.

Wyler cuts again: to mark off the sequence's resolution, in which Julie calls out ("gaily—but firmly," according to the script), "Will you kindly get me out of this!" As (with a great flurry of hands) the voluminous white gown sweeps up and over her head, Wyler gives us the astonishing sight of space suddenly opening up behind, and layers of ornate undergarments encaged within the hooplike metal dress form, whose massively restricting presence we may scarcely have been conscious of until now.

Instead of rushing immediately to try on the red dress, as we might have expected her to do (and as she probably would have done before working with Wyler), Bette strikes a strange statuelike pose—left arm extended toward the camera, palm turned out, fingers cuiied inward—reminiscent of the artistic gestures Bette's mother had been known to practice before the turn of the century.

Whether or not Wyler knew it, there was a certain historical appropriateness to selecting the fitting room sequence as the first he and Bette ever shot together. With its immediate sources in Delsarte and interpretive dance, the style of expressive movement that (for all his criticisms) Wyler prized in Bette could trace its lineage even further: to a mid-nineteenth-century American desire to free women from tightly laced and overly restrictive clothing and the broader constraints on their sex that such garments represented. The sight of Bette gesturing from within the immobilizing confines of Mme. Poulard's dress form may remind us of the liberating connotations such gestures still had for a great many women in the early decades of the twentieth century: connotations that (as much as the roles she played or the film stories she appeared in) begin to account for the powerful image of female boldness that, from Jezebel on, Bette Davis's acting would come to embody.

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In 1930—the year Bette Davis came to Hollywood—Garbo talked. "Gimme a viskey," she growled in her first sound film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Anna Christie. "Ginger ale on the side. And don' be stingy, ba-bee." That spring, Maiiene Dietrich arrived from Germany to make Morocco at Paramount with Gary Cooper and director Josef von Sternberg. And at the third annual Academy Awards ceremony in November, All Quiet on the Western Front took the prize for Best Picture. George Arliss was proclaimed Best Actor for the Warner Bros. Disraeli and Norma Shearer Best Actress for MGM's The Divorcee.

When Bette and Ruthie arrived in Los Angeles that December, the United States was in the throes of its Great Depression. By contrast with the rest of the nation, Hollywood entered a distinct boom period, which—with the notable exception of a crisis phase in 1933—extended through much of die thirties as ever greater numbers of Americans sought escape at the movies. To meet the audience demand for film fantasy, cinemas changed programs twice a week and offered double features: innovations that put immense pressure on the studios to churn out enough films to fill all the newly created slots and keep the mind of America off its troubles.

The exceptionally heavy demand for "product" helped the Hollywood studio system that had evolved in the teens and twenties to flourish in the thirties. In the interests of getting out films as quickly and efficiently as possible, it seemed to make good business sense to centralize control of all aspects of production in the hands of a few studio bosses, who, as F. Scott Fitzgerald described them in The Last Tycoon, were "able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.'' The filmmaking world Bette Davis entered in 1930 was radically different from today's more variegated Hollywood, where the only institutions even remotely approaching the all-engulfing power once wielded by the major studios are the large agencies capable of packaging the actors, writers, and directors on their client roster to get a film produced. The great screen actresses of the thirties operated strictly under long-term contract to their studios, which by and large selected, developed, and assigned each of the stars' succeeding projects.

"I, more than any single person in Hollywood, have my finger on the pulse of America," boasted MGM's Irving Thalbeig; but it might have been any of the studio bosses confidently announcing that he and he alone knew how films ought to be made and talent employed. Violent conflicts and collisions with the talent were a regular feature of the studio system. Cutting recalcitrant actors and

directors down to size was one way for Thalberg and the other film chieftains to establish their authority and superior wisdom. "I consider the director is on the set to communicate what I expect of my actors," said Thalberg, who relished coming repeatedly to blows with the brilliant and eccentric Erich von Stroheim, whose notions of absolute directorial control harked back to an earlier era that the studio boss was determined symbolically to extinguish once and for all. In 1924, Thalberg's controversial decision to mutilate von Stroheim's monstrously long masterpiece Greed by recutting it to normal feature length achieved archetypal status as precedent and backcloth for all subsequent collisions between the studios and the talent they controlled.

Men exclusively ran the studios, but the talent with whom they collided included women. In the twenties, Lillian Gish and Greta Garbo openly and unabashedly went to war with MGM's Louis B. Mayer, who prided himself on his ability to "handle" difficult artists and viewed both conflicts as a public test of his authority. Mayer "handled" the strong-willed Gish by overriding her passionate objections to the studio's alteration of the dark ending of what was to be her final film at MGM, director Victor Seastrom's The Wind. With Garbo, Mayer had considerably less success. When she scored an immense box office hit with her third film for MGM, Flesh and the Devil, Garbo violated her contract by flatly declining her next assignment, as a "stupid seductress" in Women Love Diamonds. Declaring that she had no intention of playing ' 'any more bad wom-ens," she also insisted that Mayer raise her $600 weekly salary to $5,000. "They think I am mad!" Garbo told a friend in Sweden of her astonishing decision to walk out when Mayer failed to see things her way. "This is something nobody does here. But I get so nervous over these idiotic things that I lose my head. People say that they are going to send me back home. I don't know what will happen. Haven't shown up at Metro for over a month. Oh, oh." One month stretched into seven, at the conclusion of which, as all Hollywood watched in wonder, a chastened Louis B. Mayer reluctantly agreed to give the errant actress exactly what she wanted, if only she would return to work at once.

Like other young actresses coming to Hollywood for the first time, Bette Davis likely heard the stories of Gish and Garbo, and she almost certainly was aware of the battles against studio power that actors Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney were conducting during her early months there. Both men followed a first box office hit with demands for more money and a say in the roles they were to play on-screen. That January of 1931, Robinson had not

been under long-term contract to Warner Bros, when the smash success of the film Little Caesar allowed him to demand and win a very handsome six-picture deal, at a fee of $40,000 per performance. Money was one thing, script approval another. Warners made a great point of refusing to give the actor any right to select the parts he played, it being an inviolable tenet of the studio system that the bosses knew best in all matters of production. Warner Bros, had a harder time with James Cagney after the overwhelming reception to his film Public Enemy that spring. Unlike Robinson, Cagney was a contract player at the studio when his career suddenly took off, and Jack Warner bristled at the appalling precedent that would be set should he allow the newly established star to insist upon a more generous salary and other rewards. "You got a contract; I expect you to honor it," Warner is recorded to have barked at Cagney, who promptly decamped for New York, where he announced plans to sit it out until the studio saw things his way.